


90 Beats per Minute

by bacchanalia



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Amputation, Anal Sex, Angst, Drinking, Drug Use, Fighter Pilots, Fluff and Angst, Love Letters, M/M, its really just me waxing poetic angst sue me, this is sad leave me alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-05-21
Packaged: 2018-11-03 03:42:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10958919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bacchanalia/pseuds/bacchanalia
Summary: I’m getting married. That’s what I’m supposed to do, I think.It’d mean the world to me if you were there.-Shiro.





	90 Beats per Minute

**Author's Note:**

> I just watched 5 Centimeters Per Second the day before posting this and I was devastated over it so I made it worse by writing this au. If you really want to suffer while you read, listen to the movie's ost alongside it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAe_uSLrSZY For more information about my writing along with updates, follow me on Twitter @knottygalra !

When it comes right down to it, timing is the most essential thing in the universe. Opportunities are like butterflies flitting about reality as ethereal blips in time. Grasping one, or letting it slip between your fingertips with nothing but remnants of sparkling dust left on your skin, can be the difference between happiness and regret. Most times, there is a balance, and others it can seem as if the very fabric of the universe were against you.

Keith wonders how many have slipped through the cracks like sands through the hourglass. Slow, hardly noticeable individually. Yet piled higher and higher they can become outstanding. It’s what makes up the paths in his life, he supposes. Breaths taken and decisions made and butterflies with broken wings that never seemed to grant him the route he felt in his soul he should have.

Life is cruel like that.

The letter in his hands has been read over and over numerous times. The words cut deeper than anything he’s ever had to bear witness to and yet at the same time he cannot help but read them again. He’s twenty-six years old and life should be looking up, not down. But down is where he looks and it holds nothing but Shiro’s handwriting breaking his heart.

 

_Keith,_

_I wasn’t sure if this was still your address, so I hope this letter reaches you._

_How are you doing? I know, it’s been years...right? Do you still remember me?_

_I hope so…_

_I’m getting married. That’s what I’m supposed to do, I think._

_It’d mean the world to me if you were there._

_-Shiro._

 

A lot of things would mean the world to Keith, but they are all faded memories in a distant reality that could have shaped itself into something beautiful; something where he’d never have to read the words that Shiro was giving himself away to someone else. He wonders if he retraced his steps and replayed them, would they end up here once more? With nothing in between them except vast amounts of emptiness, and time, and space? In that sense, there is everything between them.

Keith crumples the letter in his palm, relishing in the distortion of words he doesn’t want to see; watching his own left ring finger in the process and hating the fact that it is bare. Nothing adorns it aside from the knowledge that Shiro had once kissed his knuckles and smiled at him as he had done so many times. Shiro was always like that; smiling and kissing, filling Keith’s nothing and everything with his warmth. If Keith was sands in the glass of time then Shiro was the moon: ebbing and guiding the tides over and around him. Because he was all encompassing and beautiful and his voice had saturated Keith’s heart since the first day he’d heard it.

* * *

 

They had begun as things often do; small and little by little. Long enough ago that both their eyes had yet to be tainted by the ways of the universe and the unfairness that lay like a venomous snake in wait. In his lonesome world, Keith had been used to a lot of watching. He watched children on the playground have fun around him, he watched friends be made without him. It didn’t make him sad; not yet. It was in the same way that one who’s never tasted ice cream cannot miss it. Companionship was foreign; even at home, there was only his father who sat reading silently by a single artificial light in the living room of an otherwise dark apartment.  

In his room, Keith counted the stars out of his window and wondered if stardust was exclusive to space. At school, he yearned to know where the only lights in his life had gone in the sky. Then, on a day like any other, a boy who was over a head taller than him had broken his silence.

 _“_ Why are you alone? _”_ Shiro had asked Keith who was sitting on a non-moving swing set at five years old.

“I dunno…” He hadn’t thought of the why before, it made him frown, but he was always doing that.

“Do you wanna be?”

Keith kicked his feet at the sand beneath him and shrugged. A few minutes had passed between them, heavy seconds ticking by and hanging between two children who didn’t yet know what to do with time. After a while, Keith had looked up at Shiro and shook his head. _No_ , he said to himself in the safety of his mind, _I don’t want to be_.

Shiro had told him ‘ _okay’_ with his smile and outstretched hand. It was the day Keith had found out what fingers felt like lacing with his own.

‘Fitting’ described a lot of things with them. Just as Keith’s hand _fit_ within Shiro’s palm, so too did his tiny child’s heart; fluttering erratically. They spent every recess _fitting_ into each other’s spaces and connecting their laughter like puzzle pieces. When Keith looked out his window at night, he had no doubt that the matter that made up stars made up people too. If Shiro was anything, it was definitely cosmic.

Keith was eleven when he has his first kiss, even though it’s on his forehead and not on his lips. Shiro was walking him to his first day of middle school and they’re holding hands without a care in the world. Keith was nervous; he’s going to a new place and although he’s gotten used to Shiro not being beside him at recess he knows it will be emptier than elementary school. It will be on grounds where even Shiro’s memory is vacant. There will be no corner in which Keith can imagine his face, or picture him on the swings. Somehow, it feels lonelier that way.

“You scared?” He said, and Keith can hear the small bit of humor in it, as if Shiro is challenging the innate competitor in him; imploring him to defy the notion and say ‘no’. But Keith doesn’t say no because the rest of Shiro’s voice is concerned and smooth, it’s beginning to deepen to a pitch that Keith wants to fall asleep to. When people walk by them and see their hands, they assume Shiro is Keith’s older brother. Keith isn’t sure what label he would correct them with.

“Not really…” He answered, but he’s looking at the ground and avoiding the knowing eye contact Shiro is certainly giving him.

“It’s okay--” Shiro started, reaching his fingers to tilt Keith’s chin up so that he’s forced into eye contact. Holding the gaze came as natural as breathing, and Keith wasn’t convinced that Shiro’s eyes aren’t actually the source of his oxygen. “I was scared too when I started.”

Keith couldn’t imagine Shiro being afraid of anything.

“Really?” He asked simply, and was met with Shiro’s lips moving down to gently press against the skin of his forehead, fingers brushing away overgrown locks of ebony as he did so. If skin were like fruit, Keith’s cheeks would be red delicious apples in color.

“Really. You can do it.”

In middle school, Keith came to learn that he was different from other children in ways that had caught him off guard. It came as news to him that (according to a lot people) most boys were not in love with other boys. He hadn’t known, but it only added to a year of firsts for him.

For instance, it was the first time Keith had felt how terrible it is to be laughed at openly, and the first of many days he had spent eating lunch in a bathroom stall where he could get away from the sound. When he was five, loneliness had accompanied him like a shadow, it hadn’t been a bother. But now, tears fell down his face as he yearned for anything but the isolation he used to call home.

Children were cruel, but Keith did his best to ignore them. When his books were smacked out of his hands and stepped on, he’d picked them up silently. When hurtful words he didn’t yet understand were written across his locker, he’d washed it off.

“Dad, what’s a faggot?” He had asked one night at dinner. It broke the silence that dripped off his fork and onto the food he didn’t have the appetite for. Despite not knowing what it meant, Keith couldn’t help but feel guilty for having it thrown at him. Somehow, he knew it must be his fault. Something he’d done wrong, something he hadn’t caught onto. A joke that with a punchline he was missing.

“Who said that to you?” Keith wondered when his father’s voice had started to sound foreign. Did they really speak so little? He couldn’t remember, but the man’s tone was accusatory and Keith felt as if he were exposed. He wanted to ask Shiro, who didn’t look at him as if he’d done something wrong by just existing, what it meant instead.

“Some… kids at school.”

“Well why did they say that? What did you do?” The only words he’d heard from those questions were ‘ _it’s your fault_ ’.

He didn’t tell Shiro about the word. And as the days ticked by, Keith wondered if that title were so imbedded within him that he might taint Shiro just by being near him. Was the word written on his locker too? All because of Keith? Sometimes he alternated between showering twice or more a day in scalding water to try and rinse the definition from his skin, and then not bathing for days on end out of self loathing. Eleven years old was too early to become wrapped up in the monsters that made up men and why his eyes were drawn to one thing over another.

It was a shame that guilt and sadness didn’t have an age limit.

Keith was fourteen when he lost his virginity to Shiro in a desperate summer night. The moonlight was filtering in through Shiro’s bedroom window and the way his hands moved over Keith was reminiscent of how someone would hold a work of art. Reverent, patient, mapping across his skin as if every dip and curve must be committed to memory. As their lips met in heated passion, Keith tasted mint on Shiro’s tongue and deepened the kiss like he’s searching for some proof of the poison he must be infecting Shiro with. Shiro is perfect and constant, and Keith has learned over the years that as for himself, he’s only good at doing things incorrectly.

And yet, no matter how much he looks for it, Keith cannot find a single fault. Not a hint of a trace that Keith’s touch might be venom. When their chests are pressed together and Shiro’s breath in his ear, Keith shivered as their hearts beat against each other. It was a cadence that he thought he’d be able to fall asleep to every night for the rest of his life; a security he’d find nowhere else.

It reminded him of the first time Shiro had calmed him down from an anxiety attack and counted his heartbeats.

 _Did you know_ , He’d said to Keith who had been focusing very intently on breathing deeply. _That you give me almost one hundred things to be thankful for every minute?_

Keith had asked what he meant, and Shiro’s hand had covered his own and pressed it against the expanse of his chest.

 _The average heart rate._ He said. _It’s ninety beats per minute._

Never in any timeline of the universe would Keith deserve a man like Shiro. He knew this the moment the man pressed his cock against Keith’s entrance, and filled him in delicious pain entirely. Fitting. They were always finding new ways to fit together. As their bodies moved in and against each other, Keith focused on the pleasured groans that reverberated from Shiro’s throat and not the fact that this would be one of the last nights they had together. Keith had experienced many ‘last nights’ with Shiro. As if they were nothing but two asteroids caught in the gravitational pull of something beyond their comprehension yet destined to part every so often.

By now, however, it wasn’t frightening anymore. It was only a temporary that they’d endure until the next time life allowed their orbits to come back to each other. Still, Keith would ensure they used each other up until he found himself dehydrated at dawn, and even then it wouldn’t be enough.

When Keith was fifteen, he began high school with the reputation of a delinquent the same day that he received his first letter from Shiro who had moved away for college. The word that plagued him since middle school was less prevalent in direct correlation to the number of bullies who’d since received broken noses. Keith had told his father he wouldn’t fight, but quickly found himself in the business of not keeping his word.

 

_Keith,_

_Did I miss your first day, or did this get to you on time?_

_College is weird. I’m taking an astronomy class_

_and it feels like I’m supposed to learn about_

_a comet  that’s named after you._

_Shiro._

 

They wrote each other as often as time permitted, yet Keith felt increasingly that his ink on the paper was telling a story that wasn’t his own. He left out the memo that he’s started smoking, doesn’t tell Shiro that no matter what he does, he feels empty inside. He knows of course that it isn’t healthy to put his very vitality into the memory of a person who can’t hold him at night, but that doesn’t stop Keith from doing just that. After all, his heart has been in Shiro’s palm since they were five. He reasons that it’d be impossible to get it back now.

The distance is fine, he thought; tried to convince himself. But he wonders if the image he’s painting for Shiro of a Keith who isn’t drowning in nothing will someday overwrite his true self. If Shiro goes years without seeing him, will he be recognized? Will he have spun a web only to show Shiro disappointment in the end?

The thought was terrifying. But he knows that innocence and childhood doesn’t last forever, neither too do the ideas of stardust and butterflies that once took up his dreams. Reality is less forgiving. Keith knows this too. Yet still he’s unable to watch romance movies because he thinks of how unfair they are, and rejects any new friend he manages to make once they find a close love that isn’t allowed to him. Bitterness creeps into his heart like a festering wound; a fungus that thrives in the absence of starlight. Keith doesn’t graduate high school, but Shiro thinks he does. He drops out when existentialism is an elephant sitting on his chest, crushing his ribcage and blocking his path to oxygen.

 

_Keith,_

_It’s been awhile since I’ve heard from you._

_How are you doing? Don’t party too hard after graduation._

_I was thinking since you’re out of school,_

_come see me?_

 

Within minutes, there sits an open duffle bag with a sparse amount of clothes, his toothbrush, and various essential items inside it. He couldn’t have been more ready to see Shiro after so long. He would be lying if he said he hadn’t been counting, but he had and it’d been almost three years since they’d seen each other. A part of Keith is surprised he was still being asked for, still being desired. As if Shiro couldn’t simply snap his fingers and have anything he could ever want in front of him. Maybe Keith was biased. He didn’t care.

 

_Shiro,_

_I’ll be there next week. Too soon?_

_Too bad._

_Keith._

 

His father passes the day before he’s supposed to leave.

Timing.

He writes a letter to Shiro on the day he’s expected to arrive back in the arms of the only person he’s ever truly had in the world. It’s difficult to think in between tears for a man he didn’t even know very well. Wasn’t it odd, that you could live in a house with someone your entire life and not know them, but feel so connected with another who’d only shared blips in time with you? He thinks his letter is sufficient. It isn’t putting their reunion off indefinitely, only until Keith can have arrangements sorted and his emotions in check.

The day he sends it is in the middle of December, and a snowstorm hits like a hurricane. His is one of the many parcels unknowingly lost in the mail. When Shiro doesn’t respond in the next three months to a letter he never received, Keith assumes one of many scenarios in which the space between them is finally too much.

Another month passes. He receives a letter.

 

_Keith,_

_It’s been four months but I keep thinking you’ll_

_still knock on the door any minute._

_I decided to join the military._

_Do you think I’d make a good fighter pilot?_

_Shiro._

 

Keith imagines Shiro flying towards him, closing their distance and sealing the gouges all over his soul. He’s eighteen now and he feels dramatic wondering if scar tissue can form on his heart as it does everywhere else. He looks at the clock as if it’s betrayed him once he finishes the letter. His own unsent one sits at his bedroom desk announcing to Shiro that he’ll be there in a few days whether the man still wants to see him or not. Mentally, he logs away that it needs to be thrown out now.

The air force seems fitting for Shiro, even if he wonders if he’s too tall now. Keith wonders a lot of things absentmindedly; like how broad a pair of shoulders can grow in three years and if chemistry between people can resonate within their very atoms. If the cell memory exists then it must be true that he will never be free of this pining that’s seeped into his very dna. It brings a sense of drowning that he doesn’t think he’d climb out of even if he were given a ladder. Still too, he wonders if he’ll live out the rest of his physical days with nothing but printed words on paper to bind his heart to.

No longer does he have Shiro’s palm, or the sensation of their fingers lacing together. The air force isn’t a death sentence; but he can’t help but see it as another span of years he’ll spend in absence. Being alone is an ache that can’t be dulled by the cigarettes that overflow an ashtray in his one room apartment, or the beer cans that clutter his stained carpet. In another month, Keith has a second job to eat up any free time he could possibly manage. It helps. He’s able to afford small luxuries like more expensive cigarettes and cocaine when he can’t stand the thought of two a.m. sober. When he looks out his window, he thinks the stars are mocking him.

Dreams come few and far between but sometimes they depict hazy sequences where he sees Shiro’s smile as an animation reel, growing from the time they were children and maturing into something more breathtaking than he thought possible.

Two years pass without contact. Keith thinks about it on the night of a snowstorm much like the one that hit when his father died. It casts an eerie glow everywhere he looks. The soft white ice blanketing the ground in a false embrace. Beautiful in appearance yet in actuality it is lulling the flowers and grass into a final sleep. Freezing to death sounds brutal, he thinks. And yet, there is something about the gradual loss of heat, of feeling numb that resonates somewhere within him. Keith can empathize with the flowers in what it’s like to feel nothing anymore.

When his phone sounds in his pocket, the majority of him doesn’t want to answer it. He hates the cell phone he’d finally relented and bought when both his bosses complained about how difficult it was to reach him. _Write me a letter_ , he wanted to say but didn’t. His contact list was full of names that hardly carried any recognition with them. Various men that he’d accumulated in the span of his empty years to try and fruitlessly fill a space. Not having a body beside you was difficult, but Keith would contend that feeling alone despite being beside someone was even worse.

It didn’t matter how many sweet nothings were whispered in his ear on drunken nights with whiskey breath, or how much physiological pleasure was milked from his touch-starved body night after sweat-slicked night. The names he scrolled past and the attempted intimacy he tried to lose himself in did nothing but cause a recurring cycle of grief that felt like an avalanche. He was drowning in ice. Freezing from the inside out as he inhaled it to his very core.

“Did you know you normally have ninety heartbeats per minute?” He’d said one night in the darkness to a man who’d climaxed inside him yet didn’t care to ask his name. He was tugging on his jeans and leaving Keith to press at the purple marks on his skin in an attempt to feel tethered to the moment. More often than not, he found that he needed something to ground himself.

“So? The hell’s that got to do with anything?”

Keith let his eyes slide shut as his fingers pressed over his jugular. He counted to ten, and multiplied his number by six. One-hundred and twelve. Still elevated.

“Nothing.”

When Keith looked at the moon he only wanted to cry.

Days passed by much akin to a pot watched by someone who’s waiting for it to boil: agonizingly slow. His dreams slowly turned to airplanes in the sky, flying above every twist and turn the universe could possibly have to offer.

Weeks brought with them the decreasing desire to take solace in anyone else near him, months made the memories of doing just that hazy. When another year had passed, Keith celebrated the coming of age with a lottery scratcher and a bottle of tequila he could finally purchase legally. He scratched his way to nothingness with his television set a soft glow in his periphery. Almost too low to register, he heard the news of a terrible accident that caused his eyes to snap up and to attention.

“...The name of the pilot in the crash been has been released. Reports are flowing in that Takashi Shirogane’s aircraft engine experienced a severe malfunction during a test flight, causing the pilot to look control and crash.” Keith stood up from his seat so quickly that his unopened liquor bottle tipped over and crashed to the ground. Thick glass shattered subsequently yet he moved passed it without blinking an eye. His knees hit the hardwood flooring directly in front of the television screen as the news anchor continued. “Luckily, the pilot is in stable condition after being transferred to the ICU at Altean Memorial Hospital, though we are hearing rumors that due to the explosion, it’s likely he’ll lose his arm, and his ability to pilot.”

The words sink into him much like pebbles being tossed into a lake, sluggishly. The attempt to wrap his head around the very real possibility that Shiro might have been killed is a sentiment Keith doesn’t even bother grasping, it’s too alien of an idea. Despite their loss of contact, Keith still sees Shiro as his knight in shining armor, the man who extended a hand to him as a beacon of light in his dark, small world, and showed him what it truly felt like to be alive. It was a significance that had never even felt a threat to its impact on Keith’s life.

He imagined Shiro, unconscious and injured, lying in a hospital bed with a missing arm and the grief almost overwhelms him. In that moment, not a second more can pass before Keith finds his way to him again. He thinks this as he gets up and gets into his car that’s breaking down and wearing thin just like he is. It’s past midnight when he hits the highway but he doesn’t care. The news segment was reported earlier in the day, and the delay was a weight that threatened to collapse his heart.

How many hours had Shiro been lying there already? Was he awake? Was he frightened? For a moment, as his speed does nothing but increase as he flies down the desolate empty roads, Keith thinks that perhaps this one time he’ll be able to return even a sliver of the comfort to Shiro that he’s supplied him with his entire life. No amount of years would cause their connection to lessen, Keith felt this in the very depths of his soul. He knows very well how ridiculous it sounds, how out of the ordinary. He knows endlessly the sentiment of having loved and lost. But for him, he thinks, there could never be any other. Perhaps when the universe was created and the stardust exploded into every particle of matter we know today, Shiro had been beside him then too.

The idea of looking at time in the span of millions of years in space makes three seem less daunting.

When he arrives at the hospital, the sun is just beginning to peek its way across their side of the earth, and it casts hues of pink and vibrant gold into the sky. He’s tired, that its apparent in the darkened circles that had formed under his eyes during the sleepless night spent driving. But Keith doesn’t allow himself even the smallest moment to feel self-conscious over his appearances. The only thing on his mind is the knowledge that he’d do whatever it takes to ensure Shiro never has to feel the same sense of loneliness that Keith was born into.

The linoleum of the hospital floors echoes and mingles with a scent that Keith would rather not have to smell for long. He’s never liked hospitals and can’t remember when that opinion came to be. Rooms are flying past his eyesight, and Keith takes them in as he sprints in the direction a front desk attendant had pointed him in.

When Keith reaches the window of Shiro’s hospital room he is greeted by the fact that he was not the first person to make it there. A woman stands by his side, with silver hair like moonlight cascading down her back. Her skin is dark and beautiful and Keith can’t even begin to expect the knife that twists in his heart as she reaches to gingerly stroke the side of Shiro’s face.

He can’t see her expression, but he can see Shiro’s. The man’s eyes are closed with a slight furrow to his brow and there’s gauze running over the bridge of his nose. Where his right arm should be, there is extensive bandaging, he’s hooked up to oxygen, and various tubes driping fluid connect to his arm. For a moment, Keith can do nothing but stare. The realization that he’s intruding on an obviously private moment has his stomach sinking so far Keith thinks it might either cease to exist altogether or come out his throat.

Three years.

Bad timing.

He should have known Shiro would have moved on from him by now. After all, it was Keith who’d always had no one else to hold onto, not Shiro. Shiro had been a shining star, and now a woman who looked fittingly as beautiful as everything Shiro deserved stood by his side. He watched her lean in, press a kiss to his forehead and saw her shoulders tremble. If Keith had looked around to see he was still standing in the hallway of a hospital it would have been news to him. As far as he is concerned he’s being overwhelmed by the devastating reality that the thing he’d held out hope for will never come back to him. All this time, it had been unspoken between them, yet said in the meaningful glances that held entire galaxies and kisses that meant volumes within seconds.

Foolishly, Keith assumed it would have always been there, like asteroids in orbit, waiting to return to one another.

But life wasn’t obligated to uphold the assumptions of humans.

Keith turned around, unable to handle the idea of walking into a room, no, walking back into Shiro’s life when there was no room for him anymore. Where Shiro’s space was already taken and the gaps in between his fingers already filled. It wasn’t the reality of a world Keith had ever known before, so he walked away, turning his back the second Shiro’s eyes opened and saw him through the glass.

Timing.

He drives a few miles from the hospital before pulling into an open shoulder off the highway to sleep. The interior of his back seat is soaked in tears by the time he falls asleep.

Keith turns twenty-two without consequence.

Twenty-three is just as boring.

Twenty-four has him seeing the perks of drowning your sorrows under the weight of a bottle. He knows its idiotic. But sometimes when he sees the bottom of the glass he thinks about curling up within it and floating across the oceans of time as a message to himself. What would it say?

 _Don’t love him_.

No, never that.

Perhaps he would send himself to a future where the chasm in his spirit isn’t so deep he wonders if part of himself is seeping out into the atmosphere with every breath. If his very essence is leaking away with the passing of minutes on clocks that he doesn’t want to look at. It’s why he’s so tired all of the time, he figures. Because his soul was bonded to a man that has continued to move through the cosmos without him, and that’s natural. He knows this too. But natural doesn’t detract from the pain of something.

That was how they began, and ended.

* * *

Keith recounts the letter that broke another three year silence and feels as if he’s that boy alone in his car on the side of a highway again.

_Keith,_

_I wasn’t sure if this was still your address, so I hope this letter reaches you._

_How are you doing? I know, it’s been years...right? Do you still remember me?_

_I hope so…_

_I’m getting married. That’s what I’m supposed to do, I think._

_It’d mean the world to me if you were there._

_-Shiro._

He wonders if the woman with moonlight hair is the one Shiro’s promising himself to, and simultaneously doesn’t want to know the answer. The letter is in the trash as he paces the small section of his home that’s considered his kitchen. In a different world, a different life, perhaps he would have been able to go. Perhaps there would have possibly been some version of Keith in which he could look into Shiro’s eyes and say ‘congratulations’. But there isn’t and he can’t possibly so he refuses to show up.

The date comes and goes. Keith celebrates it with tears he shouldn’t have anymore and a devastating blow to his liver. He dreams of a life where he was born a normal child who held onto things the normal amount of time, but rationalizes within the space of his unconsciousness that perhaps he finds himself tethered so deeply to Shiro because he hadn’t truly been alive before they’d found each other.

Pathetic was a word that was nowhere near encompassing enough for him.

Time continued to move despite his grieving heart, forcing him to continue as well.

Two more years.

Long enough for Keith to convince himself he was over the memories of his past that contained a boy who didn’t belong to him. He moved, hours away from his old apartment, intending to leave every ounce of sadness behind him as well. In the back of his mind, he still wondered in which direction he was moving in relation to Shiro. Shiro, who was probably a father by now.

He took a deep breath, compartmentalizing that thought away with all the others he didn’t wish to have any longer.

Being a waiter is different that other jobs he’s had. He chose this one due to its busy hours and the fact that it forces him to be social. At first it’s hell and his smiles are forced, but soon enough it is bearable. The chef, Hunk, treats him like a friend and he doesn’t hold it against Keith when he turns down every invitation to grab a drink with him and his boyfriend, Lance. Keith expects Hunk’s friendship to be taken from him due to his own incompetence, but it isn’t. It is that fragile fostering of something good in his life that makes the previously unbearable two a.m. not so bad anymore. More often than not, he is asleep by then.

There is one day in particular where Keith finds his patience wearing thin. The rain is monstrous outside and yet patrons have refused to let up. Keith wonders why they don’t stay home where it’s warm; but Hunk makes the best comfort food he’s ever tasted so he guesses it’s more understandable than not.

Day turns to evening turns to night, and Keith is on the clock an hour past when his shift was supposed to end when he’s finally able to leave. He calls out his goodbyes to Hunk before walking out of the door and into the pouring rain. His car is parked down the sidewalk inconveniently as the diner is in a street-facing location. Within ten seconds, he’s soaked. As he walks, Keith passes a man who’s also traversing the rain for reasons beyond his knowledge. It’s common, to pass a stranger on a walkway. But out of the corner of his eye Keith sees that a scar is running across the bridge of the man’s nose and Keith’s footsteps come to a slow halt.

If he turns around, who will he see? A ghost? A disappointment when it’s just another man with a scar? He turns anyway, on the back of an all encompassing hope that has him terrified down to his roots.Keith’s breath catches in his throat the moment his eyes take in the man before him who turned just as he did. Tall, with a chest broadened by years of development and obvious exercise, and a missing right arm. Keith wonders if he’s breathing or if perhaps he passed out from dizziness and is now hallucinating.

Shiro is just as beautiful as he remembered.

“Keith?” His voice is deeper now too, a velvet baritone that shakes Keith to his very core over the sound of the rain. He knows he’s standing there looking like an idiot but he can help staring as much as the Earth can help itself from orbiting the sun. Stupidly, he nods. It’s all he can do. Shiro takes a step forward, hesitant. “It’s really you?”

“Hi…” His voice is hardly above a whisper, as if the tiniest movement will shatter the illusion and Shiro will disappear from his orbit once more. He’s afraid to move, afraid to blink, even his breath is suspended.

“Hey.” They stare at each other for an immeasurable amount of time and suddenly they’re children on a swingset once more; and Shiro’s eyes are asking him again if he wants to be alone and Keith can want for nothing more than the hope that his eyes are saying ‘ _no, no I don’t’_ in return.

“I’m sorry…” Keith finds himself saying before he can stop the words, they’ve been in his heart for years and if he doesn’t say them now he’ll likely never get a chance to. “I didn’t come to your wedding because I was selfish and couldn’t-- I _couldn’t_ …” It’s less eloquent than he had hoped. In his mind he had played up his apology to Shiro over and over; lamenting the only time the man had asked anything of him only to be denied. Shiro took a step towards him, still holding the compassion of a god in his eyes.

“That’s okay…” It didn’t feel okay. “I didn’t go through with it.” What? His eyes moved from where they’d fallen to the drenched pavement back to hold Shiro’s gaze.

“You… what?” Shiro was moving closer to him now, and suddenly his left hand was cradling Keith’s jaw and water cascaded down their faces and fell around them almost unnoticed.

“I couldn’t go through with it. Not when my ninety beats were still for you.”

Keith closed the distance between their mouths without another thought, his arms encircling Shiro’s neck as he forced himself closer. All at once, it was like oxygen was being poured into his lungs and color was injected into his eyes. For years he’d felt it draining, felt himself choking on a lack of something. On an emptiness yearning to be filled but lacking its missing piece. Shiro moved one of Keith’s arms to lace their fingers together and Keith was grateful he had the rain to hide the tears that streamed down his face.

“I never stopped thinking about you-- _always_ , I just… I couldn’t shake you, Shiro. No matter what I did. I felt so damn pathetic all this time…”

“You weren’t the only one.” Shiro pulled back to look into his eyes. “Let’s get out of the rain, okay?”

Keith hurried alongside Shiro seeking shelter for the rain with their hands firmly clasped together. If they were truly asteroids, then that moment was Shiro’s crash landing back into his life, a window of time in the grand scheme of the universe almost missed. But Keith was tired of watching the sand fall through his fingers, and knew that with Shiro filling his gaps between them once more, not a single granule would be missed again.


End file.
